


(Beckoning.)

by bluefisted



Series: The Search. [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: KKOB Week 2020, M/M, Modern AU, Pining, i might do another part to this?, i want to, mental illness galore, there's a lot to this au honestly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-12
Updated: 2020-02-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22684702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluefisted/pseuds/bluefisted
Summary: Right before it pulls up to the sidewalk, Kakashi manages to yell. He yells Obito’s name, loud and afraid, like it had been on the tip of his tongue for years, like it had been there for years and like saying it might bring him back.
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi/Uchiha Obito, Kakashi Hatake/Obito Uchiha
Series: The Search. [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1717990
Comments: 4
Kudos: 66





	(Beckoning.)

**Author's Note:**

> wrote this for a friend, who kind of needed it. hope you enjoy!

Kakashi imagines he could have reacted one of two ways to the information he was just so carelessly given. 

He supposes, firstly, that he could have felt nothing. At the moment, that one feels like the deliciously more appealing option. Feeling nothing, hearing nothing, seeing nothing - those options, all wrapped up in a tattered ribbon, seem to have the loudest voice in his head. They are options in the back of Kakashi’s mind, pulling, tugging on his psyche just _begging_ him for attention. Feel nothing. Do something to feel nothing. Perhaps you _shouldn’t_ feel anything. Who are you to feel at all, with this? All questions posed first by an initial sliver of knowledge, one that shouldn’t have even been driven into his skin in the first place. A piece of knowledge he’s almost certain could have been left in an old, dated grave.

Distantly, Kakashi can register a voice.

“I’ll leave you to it, then.”

There’s a gentle hand on his shoulder. At least, Kakashi thinks he might have registered one out of his peripheral vision in his good eye. He thinks it may have been Itachi’s gravelly voice, the voice that doesn’t really match his features, a voice that absolutely just sounded like sharpened nails on a chalkboard. Kakashi may have seen it happen, but he certainly doesn’t feel the contact, because at the moment, the second option of reaction is the one his head has decided to go further with.

Kakashi doesn’t laugh bitterly out loud, but he does in his head. He doesn’t feel nothing, to his chagrin. He feels _everything_.

He is not snapped out of the standstill haze by the door closing. His feet feel nailed to the carpet of his too-small apartment - the only physical sensation he can register is something wet and warm and sticky on his hands, something beginning to drench the rolled-up sleeves of his hoodie. Kakashi thinks he can feel the knife he woke up with all those years ago in his left hand, and he’s almost bang-on certain he can hear police sirens bleeding through the poorly-insulated glass windows. He’s certain that the carpet feels wet, just like his hands and his shirt, and the last tactile sensation that registers is the scar covering the left side of his face. It burns, hot like a brand, and suddenly there’s a metaphorical gun to the back of his skull.

It tells him to panic. 

So he listens. Kakashi follows the voice in his mind, the one that tells him to feel everything, the voice wielding a weapon. He allows the skeletons of his past reach up through the cracks in the floor, to grip the collar of his shirt to press him almost face-first into the carpet. He sits with his head between his knees, like the cold steel of a barrel is still there to egg him on, press him even further. His fingers are entwined behind his head at the base of his skull, clasped together as if they were kevlar to defend against the incoming shot, his lungs completely paralyzed in his ribcage.

There’s a choked sound, a sound only a fool or an empath might call a sob, and Kakashi can’t manage to force a breath around the one coherent thought he’s clinging to. 

_He’s alive._

He’s alive. 

Kakashi fits two fingers under his fabric mask to pull it down and off his face. He can’t breathe around it, and only when it’s away from his mouth does he manage a shuddering inhale. A shuddering inhale, something like a whine, and then true tears. True tears for what must have been the first time in months - the first time in a good many months, if you’re basing the information factually. Emotionally, though, for Kakashi, these tears had not been shed since the funeral with no body. These tears had not been shed since the earth-shattering scream he let out that day in the woods, flashlight in hand, hope dwindling. These tears had not been shed since the first search. These tears had not been shed, except perhaps in the mirror, in private.

_ Obito Uchiha is alive, you know. I just thought you deserved to know. We had... A difference of opinion on that. _

“A difference of opinion,” Kakashi parrots dumbly, hoarse. He swallows thickly, still unable to move from his near fetal position, fingers gripping each other tighter and gathering some of the hair at the back of his neck. “Difference of opinion.” 

What the hell did that _mean_ , he thinks around a sniffle. What the hell did Itachi mean, _d_ _ifference of opinion?_ That Obito hadn’t wanted to be found or known about, but Itachi slid his apparently still-warm corpse under the bus anyway? What did that imply? That Obito left on purpose, disappeared that day for fun? _He wouldn’t have,_ Kakashi thinks around another closed-throat sob, _I knew him better than that_. Obito wouldn’t have left. Rin was there, she was with _us_ , he had no reason to leave. He had reason to be loved. He was loved. 

That same thought makes Kakashi release the deathgrip on his own hands, and turn it to his shoulders. He rubs at his arms desperately, almost as if trying to warm himself up, as if the shivering were caused by a drop in temperature and not the skeletons trying to shake him awake. Out of this daydream his mind had conjured, like the ones he sometimes has when he’s too high on something he shouldn’t be, like the ones with Rin and Obito at a distance and they’re smiling and they’re alive, not paying attention, happier without him. He’s almost sure that if he were to lift his head right now, he would see them in the kitchen, cooking and dancing and frozen at age thirteen. Rin was loved. Obito was loved. Kakashi had been in love. _Hell,_ he thinks with another shuddering inhale, _I might still be._ So _why leave?_

All at once, Kakashi can almost _feel_ something click in his head.

_No, that’s true,_ he thinks with a sour feeling in his stomach, the taste reaching up to brush the back of his tongue. _Why leave?_

It’s this thought that pushes Kakashi to his feet again. Quickly, at that - as if the gun that had previously ordered him to panic had gone off in the wrong direction, instead hitting the assailant instead of the victim, affording a chance to escape the cage of fear and regret. The skeletons grasping at his collar, his arms and wrists crumble pathetically, and in a moment, Kakashi is wiping his face and fixing his mask back into place.

_Why leave?_

There’s a long answer and a short answer, and Kakashi goes through both as he snatches a backpack out of his bedroom closet. The short answer is that he _wouldn’t_. Obito would have never just up and left him and Rin, not the way they were, not as happy as they had been. In the back of his head, the boy sat dead and rotting starts to stir in his grave. Kakashi can hear nails against wood, _he’s been scratching at the coffin lid for years and I didn’t hear a fucking thing_ , but the sound is drowned out by the rest of the screaming in his mind. The police sirens, the begging, _I didn’t kill her I didn’t,_ the crying. But the sound is there, the sound of a boy perhaps not wanting to be found, but one still alive. Obito wouldn’t have left. That’s the short answer.

The long answer, Kakashi decides, he can go over in the car.

That’s all theorizing anyway, he thinks, trying to breathe. He’s not entirely sure what he’s even packing into the bag he grabbed, at this point - he registers that perhaps he’s grabbed jeans, perhaps he’s grabbed unmatched socks, and he may have grabbed a toothbrush from the bathroom in all his pacing. But it doesn’t matter, none of it really matters, because credit cards exist and packs of shirts and packs of toothpaste and all that _bullshit_ can just be bought later because they’re all material and it just _does not_ _matter._ It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter because Obito’s still out there and with another choked sound Kakashi realizes he just can’t leave that alone. He can’t leave him alone. Not again. Never again. No matter how long it takes, no matter who helps and who doesn’t. Obito won’t be alone. Not again. Kakashi won’t fail again.

By the time his bag is full, he can’t even remember what he put in it. It doesn’t matter. The only thing he makes absolutely sure to grab is his own half-finished pack of cigarettes, and--

Kakashi is halfway out the door when he pauses. 

He has one hand on the doorknob, a foot out the door, and he pauses. Slowly, he looks back into his dark apartment, and turns to step back inside. 

Almost gingerly, as if afraid of waking a nonexistent sleeping occupant, he makes his way back into his own room. He drops his bag by the bed, kneeling carefully beside the edge, and draws in a deep breath before letting his fingers slip between the mattress and the bedframe. They follow the space, sliding across in both directions, searching for something he’ll miss if he doesn’t pay close, nearly paranoid attention.

...Ah.

Kakashi’s eyes shut for just a second while he carefully grasps at a thin paper edge, pulling outward as if afraid something might snap on his hand and entrap him in place. He can hear the noise it makes being freed, and still, he doesn’t open his eyes. Not yet. 

_It’s been years,_ Kakashi thinks as he cracks both eyes open, _since I’ve seen this photo._

It’s old, faded, and worn in places. There are fold marks worn into it, making it easy to turn into a pocket-sized memory. Rin and Obito are the only two people in it, smiling widely at the camera. What they were all doing together, Kakashi can’t remember. That thought alone is enough to bring back the chest-chokes, but it doesn’t. Because the only thing that matters about the photo is that the pair of them are still alive in it, they’re smiling, and they’re happy. They have no idea they’ll die. Rin doesn’t know their story will make national television, and Obito doesn’t know he’ll turn into a ghost.

The photo is slid into the forward-most pocket of Kakashi’s backpack, and he leaves. Quietly, without a word and in the middle of the damn night, like he’d thought about doing so many times in the past. The door to his apartment is locked, both deadbolt and doorknob, and he makes sure to leave a note wedged into the door. 

**Not home for awhile. Call if you need something.**

_I’ll find you,_ Kakashi thinks, sliding into the driver’s seat of his car, _I’ll find you if it’s the last thing I do. I’ll find you if you don’t want me to. I’ll find you_.

There’s a short buzzing from his back pocket, and Kakashi is almost sure he knows who it’s from. At least, he’s almost sure he knows whose _friends_ might have sent it along.

**UNKNOWN.**

**IMG ATTACHED.**

**IMG ATTACHED.**

With an exasperated sigh, he taps the notification and unlocks his phone, met with exactly what he thought it might be.

The two photos attached are of himself, both taken what must have been just moments ago. The first is one taken mid-motion; In it, Kakashi is sliding into his car, ever so slightly blurry, drowned out by the orange of the streetlights and faded by the dark. The second, you can see the light from his own screen as he’s checking his phone, something that might be a lovely candid if not taken from a vantage point unseen, and. Well. Everything else. 

Kakashi tightens his grip on his phone, feeling himself reaching a boiling point he doesn’t think he’s ever reached before. 

With shaking fingers, he types out the first reply he’s ever sent to these messages.

**Read 1:27 AM, you fucker.**

This is not the first time he’s gotten images of himself sent to his own cellphone from a no-name, untraceable number. Ever since Itachi waltzed back into his living room a few years ago to report that yeah, I am alive and if you could just look after my little brother that would be great bye, he’s been getting them. Always when he gets a little too close. Always when he finds out something else, always when Itachi lets something slip in a way that’s certainly purposeful. Kakashi’s not fool enough to think it’s all harmless - it’s _not_. He learned in prison that Itachi doesn’t bluff, not usually, and if he doesn’t then the friends he’s made since then most definitely don’t either. In receiving those pictures, though, no matter how unnerving, it tells him exactly what he needs to hear. 

He’s getting too close to something he shouldn’t be, again. Maybe that something is Obito.

Kakashi chucks his phone into the passenger seat and turns the key in the ignition. He doesn’t have a direction in mind, and he doesn’t have a place. Just an old picture of an old friend, and an idea in mind. He’d turn over every bar, every tiny little town and every off-beaten RV park in the US if it meant finding that man alive. 

He knows very well it might take doing just that. This could take months. It could take weeks. It could take years, just like the ones that have passed since he just vanished. Since he just vanished, right off the street, right out from under everyone, without a word, without a trace, without even a hair left behind. These years could be just like the last ones. Cold, dark, and very lonely. 

But if Obito is alive, if Itachi is telling the truth - and, with a twist in his stomach, Kakashi realizes he could very well be lying - then all of this is worth it. Every dollar spent on gas, on motels. Every night spent in a parking lot, because yeah, this is definitely gonna take a lot of money but all of it will be worth it, every single day and every single night and moment spent will be _worth it_ for even the _idea_ that Kakashi will get to look at him just one more time. If he’s lucky, he’ll get to hold him just one more time, and if he’s lucky, he’ll get to see that smile just one more time.

The chest-chokes return with a vengeance, and Kakashi grips the wheel as hard as he can. He doesn’t cry. His face below his mask doesn’t betray his mind, either. His brows furrow, and with just slightly too much force, he prods at the power button for the radio. Late-night traffic reports were better than silence. Better than going back home to the apartment in his own head. At least he can live there rent-free. 

\--

He was right.

Kakashi didn’t think he would drive for forty hours straight, stop, chance and encounter with his thought-to-be-dead best friend and have it all just work out like a happy little fairytale. He wasn’t that naive, and he definitely wasn’t that stupid. It’s been days, now, driving, stopping to sleep and shower, and then keep on. Every hotel receptionist, every poor drive-thru attendant has to hear the same prompt: Have you seen this man? Anywhere, anybody that might look like him? His name is Obito, but he might not go by that anymore. He has a scar on his left temple. A fight we got into when we were young, he doesn’t add. He never adds that very last bit, he doesn’t think he can or even that it matters. All that matters is the scar, all that matters is his name. 

They all give him the same look, sad, full of pity. No, they’ll say. I don’t recognize him, I’m sorry. 

Kakashi will nod, smile with his eyes, and thank them for their time. He’ll exit the building or pull away from the drive, light a cigarette for the third time that morning, and try not to let the choking in his ribs turn into anything other than an uncomfortable sensation he can force back down his throat. He turns the feeling into something he can manage, and starts in on the next freeway he can find that won’t take him back home. It’s a process he’s been repeating as often as humanly possible. It’s a process that won’t stop for the foreseeable future. No, all of America will say. I haven’t seen that man. I’m sorry. Have you tried the police? Have you filed a missing persons report? Good luck searching. 

Always the same thing. The same infuriating answer. 

\--

It’s a Tuesday night, the first time Kakashi thinks he may have hallucinated. 

It’s a Tuesday night, early in the dark, just outside a park in some kind-of-okay downtown area in _God_ knows where. Kakashi is starting to wonder if Obito is sentimental enough to go back to New York, where the three of them had once raised absolute hell. He does at least know he’s nowhere near that state, but the idea is becoming appealing, especially while he’s thinking it over while staring into what may be the largest black coffee he’s ever ordered in his entire life. The caffeine gives him a bunch of ideas, probably none of them good, but they’re directions nonetheless. They’re a trail to follow, because all of the ones Kakashi has traced up until this point have done nothing but fail him. Obito is a ghost. There’s _nothing_ out there anymore, nothing about him, as if someone had taken who he was and scraped it away to make someone else. As if Obito had been shaped into something Kakashi wouldn’t recognize, even if he stared him in the face. That thought makes him begin to tremble just the slightest bit.

Kakashi tries to steady his own hand by placing his free one atop his wrist. He brings his coffee up, moving his mask just enough to take a sip of it, and tries not to think on that idea for too long.

_Bullshit,_ something in Kakashi’s mind barks nearly out of left-field. _I’d know him anywhere. No matter how he is now, I would know him._

Kakashi sighs through his nose. He isn’t here anyway. This entire town, from the bar to the bank, has been turned upside down. Obito isn’t here. It’s time to grab his coffee and his backpack from off the bench, and move the fuck _on_.

So he motions to do just that. He makes sure the paper lid is sat firmly on his cup, checks the spot where he was sitting to make sure nothing’s left behind, and turns to walk back to where he’d parked down the street. 

At least, he’d planned to, before he’d essentially stepped in world’s sturdiest superglue. 

Across the four-lane street, there’s a man dressed primarily in black, carrying a bag of his own. His face is obscured - at least, his eyes are - by a hat, and a downward glance at his phone, which he seems to be typing at with one hand. There’s a lit cigarette in the other, and a duffel bag slung across his back. His shoulders are broad, his visible profile slim, and without breaking his gaze away Kakashi reaches for the memory tucked safely in his back pocket. He doesn’t open the folded photo, but he does hold onto it, because he’s fairly certain he couldn’t move a muscle even if he wanted to, _especially_ as the familiar stranger looks up and right at him.

Kakashi can feel the wind get punched from his lungs. Even from the distance they’re at, he can see the other man’s face contort just slightly. He can see the details of what looks to be like some kind of harsh scarring on the right-hand side of his face, his thin eyes. His eyes. Kakashi has a clear view of them now, and it confirms two very polarly-opposite things - that man is as much a stranger as any other passerby, and that man is as familiar as the boy he once shared a home with after his father’s passing. He’s seen those eyes in his dreams, and at the very same time, he’s never seen them before in his life. 

The stranger doesn’t break harsh eye-contact as he waves a cab with the hand still smoking a cigarette. He doesn’t break a calculating, _f_ _reezing_ stare as he slides into the back of it, and he doesn’t break that stare as he takes one last drag as the car pulls away from the curb. 

Kakashi is left, head turning to follow the taxi as it starts down the street, dumbfounded. 

His legs scream to give chase, and his heart screams _that was him, you idiot, that was him and you missed him, what are you doing standing stock still,_ run!

His head screams that it couldn’t have been. Chance encounters don’t happen. 

Either way, Kakashi is left to stand frozen on the sidewalk. Either way, his hammering heart begs him for a cigarette, a call he can’t answer, and twitching hands are left holding the memory. It could have been two minutes or two hours he stood, watching until that taxi was out of sight, and then standing there some more. All he knows is that when his feet let him move, his ribcage is squeezing his lungs, poking into the flesh hard enough to nearly puncture them. All he knows is that by the time he reaches the car, there’s a cigarette in his mouth, and the chest-chokes are back with an impossible vengeance that just might crush more tears out of him yet. 

\--

Kakashi has nightmares about it, the next time he sleeps. 

It’s Obito, and this time, he’s thirteen. Old as he was when he died. He stands where that stranger stood, doing the same thing, smoking a cigarette and sitting on his phone, except this time he’s playing a phone game and Kakashi doesn’t really know how he knows that, it’s just a feeling in the back of his head that yells at him as he watches from across the street. It feels like he stands there for hours, the cab is slowly coming down the street and if he doesn’t open his throat to speak, Obito will get in it and disappear. He’ll disappear, without a trace, without a sign, and Kakashi will never find him again.

Right before it pulls up to the sidewalk, Kakashi manages to yell. He yells Obito’s name, loud and afraid, like it had been on the tip of his tongue for years, like it had been there for years and like saying it might bring him back. 

Obito looks up, excited, and stands. Careless and reckless, he stands, runs into the middle of the street, and pays the price for it. The cab hits him, Obito hits the pavement, and there’s so much blood the smell of it immediately hits Kakashi’s nose. He can feel himself screaming, can feel his vocal chords tearing in his throat, but he can’t move.

Obito doesn’t move either. Kakashi wakes up with a sore throat and a wet face. 

\--

Kakashi thinks he hallucinates again a week later, approaching New York. 

This time, it’s a closer encounter. This time, that stranger passes right by him, passes right by the cafe he’d been sitting in, right by the little bar facing the street behind a layer of glass. But it’s the same man, that same stranger, and Kakashi isn’t actually sure whether or not he believes his own illnesses when they beg him to believe he’s not seeing what he is. He decides to throw away everything that he knew before, or thought he knew, in effort to follow a man who could very well be a complete and total, _true_ stranger. A moment of embarrassment, or a lifetime of knowing Obito again? Because if it were him, if that man passing by on the other side of the cafe’s glass _was_ Obito, Kakashi wouldn’t let him go. 

It’s with that thought that he grabs his bag, forgets his food and forgets the bill, and damn near dashes out the door. 

He follows the direction he’d seen the man walking - off to the left, he starts at almost a run, eyes trying to search for the unfamiliar frame. His heart picks up as he finds _nothing_ , no one that looked even remotely similar to the man that _just_ walked by, and it starts to bring back that feeling in his chest. The same one that he gets every time, the lung-puncturing squeezing. He doesn’t give up, though, instead electing to keep walking just in case he caught the trail again. In case that man comes back around a corner, in case he comes out of a shop, in case he goes into one. 

Nothing. 

Kakashi stops at a crosswalk, but doesn’t move with the rest of the crowd when they make their way across. He stops, waits, almost breathless from both his own anxiety and paced searching. He adjusts the mask sitting on his face just slightly, and closes his eyes for just a second.

He lets himself play ball with his delusion.

_If it_ were _Obito I just saw,_ he thinks carefully, _where would I_ hide?

When his eyes open, he makes sure his good one is the one he’s primarily looking out of. It’s a slow scan, this time, as he shoves his panic into his stomach to rot for just a moment. He can’t afford the distraction racing thoughts bring. So he tries a different approach, one with more sense, and less feeling. Well, just as much feeling, but definitely more sense. Kakashi’s eyes move up and down both sides of the street slowly, scanning.

Boom.

He’d _definitely_ nearly given Kakashi the slip, that much was sure. In fact, that stranger ended up so far down the other end of the street that had Kakashi not well and truly focused, he’d have lost him.

But at that same moment, the stranger seems to get wise. He turns to look back, catching Kakashi’s eye, and ducks down a side street.

Which, of course, throws him into an incredible action he’d never felt before. He’d only felt this kind of adrenaline a few times in his life, all preceding terrible, life-changing events - he felt like this the day he woke up over Rin’s body. He felt like this at the guilty verdict. He felt like this the first time Itachi showed up in his living room like nothing was wrong, like he hadn’t been missing for months. Years. He felt like this when Itachi told him Obito yet lived.

It fit, in Kakashi’s mind, that he’d feel like this chasing the man’s ghost. 

Still, the adrenaline makes him move. It sends him flying across the street, shoving past any and everyone who gets into his way. He can feel himself starting to pant behind his mask, both from the panic and from the adrenaline, but he doesn’t stop running. He doesn’t stop until he’s got to skid to a halt in front of the entrance to that side street, where his heart drops so hard into his stomach he thinks he can hear the splash of it hitting acid. 

There’s _nothing_ down it, except a rusty old fire escape leading up onto some building. 

Kakashi can feel his throat close. He can feel the dread, the looming failure, the feeling of naivety and stupidity for ever thinking it could’ve _r_ _eally_ been him. That it could have ever been Obito. He feels, at this moment, like an idiot for trusting the man that usually just showed up in his living room at two AM to tell him something vaguely traumatic and in the same breath ask for his little brother to be watched over. He feels like an idiot for trusting Itachi at his word, and like an idiot for believing he could ever just go looking for Obito and actually find him. Kakashi stands in that, for all intents and purposes, _alleyway_ , and tries not to lose his fucking mind.

He doesn’t. Kakashi fixes his mask, swallows the pain, and makes plans to go to New York. If for no other reason to drink himself to death in a bar close to where she died. 

\--

This is the third bar Kakashi’s been to tonight, and the second set of X’s he’s received to the backs of his hands. 

He can’t remember where he was earlier today. In fact, the only thing he might know for sure is the state, which _is_ in fact New York. Not the city, because it’s too loud there, and there’s nothing but ghosts lingering. This isn’t a nice bar, not really, but the cheap vodka is both fantastic and gut-turning all at the same time. Then again, the gut-turning might not be from quality, but rather from quantity. At the very least, quantity is _definitely_ why the room is turning. It’s definitely why the tightness in his chest won’t ease, and it’s definitely why he can’t seem to stop seeing their faces in each and every corner of this absolute _fucking_ dive he suddenly does not want to be in anymore. 

The bartender has long since left him alone, after cutting him off. Kakashi has about a shot left in his double, and he plans on finishing it - assuming, of course, he can manage to lift his head off the bar and out of his arms. One hand still loosely has hold of his glass, and beyond lifting it to his mouth, he’d probably call himself mostly immobile. The thought of getting off the stool has his stomach turning harder than the room already is. He could laugh at the entire situation right now, if he wanted. Laugh so fucking hard he just cried instead. 

Kakashi does manage to lift his head just enough to take another drink, and distantly, he registers that someone’s sat next to him. 

“...How drunk is he?” Comes the inquiry, apparently not directed at him. Whoever had spoken has a nice voice, he thinks absentmindedly. Rough, even-toned, and low. He thinks Obito might have sounded like that, if he were still alive.

Kakashi’s certain, even the way he is, that the next voice is the bartender. “Drunk enough that I used a Sharpie for those X’s. If you try and order for him, I’m gonna have to say no in his honor.” 

“No,” Comes the low voice, “I’m not ordering this time. Taking him home.”

_The fuck you are,_ Kakashi thinks, though nothing comes out of his mouth. He can’t look up, or raise his head more than a couple inches off the bar, but he will be goddamned if he goes ‘home’ with anyone. Not out of lack of desire for distraction, and not even out of probably being too drunk to have anything resembling good sex, but for nothing other than the fact that he’s definitely gonna find out how many shots it takes to melt a liver. 

“You know him?” The bartender asks, and Kakashi wants more than anything to be a part of this conversation that is most certainly about him. He wants to say _no,_ I’m not moving. Kick me out at last call, if you have to. I won’t fight you on that one, but for now, I just need somewhere to be.

“Yeah,” There’s hesitation in the voice, and nearly a trace of something like disgust. Maybe shame. Kakashi’s gut tells him it sounds like disgusted guilt. “Old friend I haven’t seen in a long, long time.”

_Old friend?_ Kakashi manages a drunken grimace to no one but himself. _Fuck you, old friend._ This girl was a bartender, and she couldn’t tell the difference in a creep and an actual friend who--

“Okay. Take care of him, Tobi.”

“Yeah. I will.”

Kakashi’s blood runs cold, and he forces himself to look up despite the spinning, battling at least seven waves of nausea in the process of doing so. 

He’s certain this man is no hallucination. This will have made the third time they’ve ‘met’. It’s those eyes. They look the same, Kakashi swears. He remembers seeing a stranger when he was sober, but inebriated, this man is beyond recognizable. He could pick this man out of a crowd of thousands, with his head down and a hat on. He could pick this man out of a memory. He could show this man one of his own memories right now, if he were so inclined. Kakashi had know this man in death, and he’s looking at him now in life.

“How drunk are you?” This time, the question is thrown at him with a pointed look. Disgusted guilt accompanies the tone and the stare, now. 

“Shitfaced.” Kakashi breathes, unable to conjure even the whitest of lies. “Obito, you--”

“Stop.” Undoubtedly, it’s a command. Kakashi’s teeth click shut, and he doesn’t speak another word. “Can you get into a car on your own?”

“Uhm,” Kakashi answers brilliantly, head falling back down into his arms. “...Probably?”

“Then get up,” Another command. The silver-haired man could probably cry on command at how different he sounds. “Walk. Follow me.”

“I spent, like, twenty-two-ish years waiting for a fuckin’ glorified Uber, huh?” Kakashi bites, venom dripping into his voice. He’d never been one for anger or bitterness in his inebriation, but something about Obito’s tone was driving him insane. He had no fucking idea what had happened in the years past. He had no idea the level of _grief_ and _mourning_ with him and with--

Kakashi feels his throat close again, and in a last show of bravado, stands and slams the remainder of the alcohol in his glass. 

Obito shuts his eyes, and even now, the younger man can tell he’s exasperated. _But fuck him,_ he thinks drunkenly, _you can be exasperated all you want. Least you weren’t fucking positively devastated for twenty-two-ish years._

“Just walk. I’ll tell you when we’re at the car.”

_Fuck you,_ Kakashi thinks again. The thought repeats itself when Obito catches him on a stumble, deft and iron-gripped, slinging one of Kakashi’s arms over broad shoulders to keep him upright and moving. One of Obito’s calloused hands - when did they get like that? - keeps hold on his wrist, and the other arm is around his waist, hand on Kakashi’s side. He doesn’t walk beside Obito so much as he is sort of dragged, dragged until he hears the sound of a car door opening and can feel himself falling into the passenger seat somewhat unceremoniously. It’s not rough, necessarily, but Obito’s movements are exasperated.

Suddenly, as the passenger door is shut for him, Kakashi wonders just how much of Obito’s apparent frustration is caused by him, and how much of it is caused by the man’s own thoughts. 

The silver-haired man leans his head against the window, and tries not to watch as things pass by. The motion blur makes him sick.

“Where are you staying.” It’s not a question, it’s another command for information. 

“I feel like you already know,” Kakashi says, his mouth moving without consulting his brain. “I feel like you’ve been watching me as much as I’ve been looking for you.”

If Obito makes a face, or white-knuckles the wheel, Kakashi doesn’t notice. The other man says nothing, and they nearly spend the ride in silence until he finds it in him to speak again. “Speaking of,” he slurs, quiet, almost sad. “Are you real?”

“...Unfortunately.”

Kakashi feels his heart flutter like a child. The response given shouldn’t have elicited that response in him, but it did. He wears a straight face, though, because letting Obito see how that made him feel feels directly akin to suicide. He decides he wants to know more. Anything, everything, and maybe even nothing at all. 

“...What _happened_ to you?”

This time, Kakashi catches Obito’s jaw clenching tightly. There’s no response to this, and the closest thing he gets to one is Obito pulling into the parking lot of the motel Kakashi’s staying in. So I was right, he thinks, he was watching me. 

There’s a moment of silence, before Kakashi admits something he would absolutely rather not. “You’re… Gonna hafta help me out with this one.” 

Obito sighs through his nose, and wordlessly gets out to do exactly that. They assume the same position as they did leaving the bar, one of Kakashi’s arms over Obito’s shoulders while Obito keeps one of his own circled around the younger’s waist. Kakashi can feel Obito’s hands through his shirt, cold and stiff, kind of like a corpse, kind of like how he’d thought Obito was dead, he kind of feels like that, except under these shitty yellow motel outdoor hallway lights he doesn’t _look_ like a corpse. He looks beautiful. Kakashi doesn’t think Obito could ever not look beautiful to him.

“Sorry,” Kakashi finally whispers, and it’s this that makes Obito’s head turn to look at him just a little. “I’m. Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” the reply is almost, _almost_ tender, steeled at the very last moment. “It’s fine. Just go to bed when you get in.” 

Kakashi thinks about that. He thinks about the fact that he’ll definitely, _definitely_ have a hangover, and he’ll definitely need to sleep with a trash can by the bed. He thinks about that, the fact that he’ll need water when he gets in. He thinks again about how cold that hand is on his waist. How nice it would feel in other places, how it’d feel sliding up his shirt, if the rest of Obito’s body is cold, if Kakashi himself could heat it up, if they could fall in love again, if--

They’re stumbling through the door before Kakashi realizes Obito had, at some point, gotten hold of his room key. 

Obito, this time, is almost careful putting him into bed. Obito apparently doesn’t bother peeling back the comforter, instead just making sure the other’s head hits the pillow. Kakashi can do nothing but lay where he is, and watch as Obito goes to grab things around the room.

... _Yeah_ , Kakashi thinks as the nausea picks right back up, _probably shouldn’t fall into bed with anyone tonight._

He tries to bury his face in the pillow, because shutting his eyes makes the room spin faster, harder. There’s a sound by his bedside, a hollow one. A trash can being put into place, probably. Kakashi manages to open his eyes, and feels himself stop breathing.

He’s drunk, it’s true. But watching Obito work open a pill bottle next to the fluorescent lamp in an otherwise dark motel room, looking at the way it catches all his features from the deep scarring on his right side to the sharpness of the tip of his nose, makes him look like he had in each and every one of Kakashi’s good dreams combined. He didn’t look soft. Gentle was not even in his vocabulary. But he looked real and alive, at the very least, and that was enough.

“These are painkillers. Take them in the morning. There’s water by them.”

Kakashi doesn’t nod, but holds his stare and averts the directions in their entirety.

“...I’m not going to see you again, am I?”

The sad truth. Obito stands stock still. 

“Not if you value staying alive.”

“What if I don’t?”

“Start driving home tomorrow, Kakashi.”

Kakashi doesn’t just stop breathing again at the sound of his own name, he stops thinking. Well, to say he stopped thinking entirely would be a lie - he didn’t. He thinks only on the tone Obito uses, the way he holds himself now. Like he’s strong, now, where he was weak before. He was never weak before, but where he was soft, he turned to steel. He’s been put to the grindstone. Something happened to him, and not just physically. Even like this, Kakashi knew better than to think of himself as some sort of fix-all to whatever his old friend had going on. But he doesn’t think he wants to fix it. He doesn’t think about being some kind of savior to a man he may not know anymore.

He just thinks about seeing him again.

“If I don’t?”

“Kakashi, don’t play this game with me,” Obito warns, and it’s a legitimate warning. There’s no joke, no hesitation in his voice. There’s no affection in it. There’s nothing but true seriousness. “I am telling you to go home. I am telling you to check out tomorrow, and not come back. I am a ghost in your world. You don’t know me. Understand?”

Kakashi doesn’t answer. He can’t. Obito seems to understand the weight of his words have been put to the scale. 

A hand, not tender, not gentle, runs through his own hair. It’s not careful. But where Kakashi thought Obito was going to wind his fist in it to make the threat more than verbal, he pets. It’s not _really_ a pet, so much as the ghosting of his thumb running over Kakashi’s temple ever so slightly. 

Like a goodbye of his own.

“Bed.”

The hand is gone too fast, and Obito is standing in the threshold before Kakashi can blink. He’s fast. “I mean it,” Comes that gravelly voice, “I am still dead to you.”

The door closes. The silence is overwhelming. 

Kakashi leans over the side of the bed, grabs the trash can, and tries not to lose _all_ of his dinner.


End file.
